“It’s got to be a poet who says, ‘This virtue still matters,’ because we’re at a moment where we don’t even know what to do with things that are not fairy tales but also not physics.

Jennifer Michael Hecht Poetry Foundation Poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht earned a BA in history from Adelphi University and a PhD in the history of science from Columbia University. Jennifer is a poet and historian and in this interview, she makes a solid case for the important place that poetry-and other art forms-can have in our lives. Her books include Doubt: A History (2003) The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism. 'If we are interested in truth, and in our own freedom, we ought to celebrate that which convinces us to doubt'. 'Waves' track written and produced by Makaih Beats American poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht on doubt.

Join the Deconversion Anonymous Facebook group The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Livesįor quotes, recommendations, transcripts and more see the full episode show notes This is a great conversation that you won’t want to miss! “It’s got to be a poet who says, ‘This virtue still matters,’ because we’re at a moment where we don’t even know what to do with things that are not fairy tales but also not physics.”

Jennifer is a poet and historian and in this interview, she makes a solid case for the important place that poetry-and other art forms-can have in our lives.

Her latest book, The Wonder Paradox: Embracing the Weirdness of Existence and the Poetry of Our Lives comes out this week! This remarkable book ranges from the early Greeks, Hebrew figures such as Job and Ecclesiastes, Eastern critical wisdom, Roman stoicism, Jesus as a man of doubt, Gnosticism and Christian mystics, medieval Islamic, Jewish and Christian skeptics, secularism, the rise of science, modern and contemporary critical thinkers such as Schopenhauer, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, the existentialists.This week’s guest is Jennifer Michael Hecht, bestselling author of Doubt: a History plus many other works. This is an account of the world's greatest ‘intellectual virtuosos,' who are also humanity's greatest doubters and disbelievers, from the ancient Greek philosophers, Jesus, and the Eastern religions, to modern secular equivalents Marx, Freud and Darwin-and their attempts to reconcile the seeming meaninglessness of the universe with the human need for meaning, In the tradition of grand sweeping histories such as From Dawn To Decadence, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and A History of God, Hecht champions doubt and questioning as one of the great and noble, if unheralded, intellectual traditions that distinguish the Western mind especially-from Socrates to Galileo and Darwin to Wittgenstein and Hawking.

Doubt by Jennifer Michael Hecht